Zalman VE-200 partitions become RAW, lose NTFS file format

I have had an issue with my Zalman VE-200 hard drive enclosure recently, where several partitions suddenly become RAW and I appear to lose all the files.  If I use the drive as a virtual CD I can still see all my iso files and they will mount.

The last time this happened was when I tried mounting a Windows Server 2012 R2 image which wouldn't boot. After attempting to mount the image the partitions became blank and I thought I had lost everything.

After Googling for ages and only coming up with reviews, I decided to try a few things. In the past I had reformatted the partition and everything was fine, but this time I needed to keep the ios's I had collected.

Hopefully you will have left a folder with the Zalman firmware in, in the _iso partition you need on these drives. If so, re load the current firmware again by mounting it as a virtual CD image. You should now have access to your files again.

If you haven't left the Zalman firmware on, hopefully you have access to the _iso folder or another partition you could try to reformat and set up as an _iso folder, and then copy the firmware into that folder. Creating a new _iso folder may not work, as I believe it needs to be the first partition on the drive.

For me, the drive or the 2012 iso is corrupt, I believe it to be a bad sector on my drive, so a quick run of chkdsk /r /f and things seem to have gone back to normal.

Zalman VE-400 info.

This is the VE-400 version of the drive on Amazon: